The Book of Longings(18)

“Now me,” she said.

I dipped my finger into the vial and touched her forehead. “I anoint you Tabitha, friend of Ana.” And this time she didn’t laugh.

We repacked the chest as we’d found it and hurried from the room, exhilarated and reeking, leaving behind a great deal of olfactory evidence of our plundering.

Yaltha waited for us in my room. She shook the sistrum, setting loose a shimmering sound. Tabitha began to sing, and with a nod at me to follow her lead, sank her eyelids closed and danced. I closed my eyes, too, but stood there, motionless and inhibited. You are very serious, I told myself, and then let my arms and legs do as they pleased. I swayed. I was a willow reed. A floating cloud. A raven. I was a blind girl pretending to see.

Once I careened into Tabitha, and she found my hand and didn’t let go. I didn’t think once of Nathaniel. I thought of the young man in the market who’d lifted me to my feet. I thought of scrolls and ink. In the darkness behind my eyes, I was free.





xi.


On the days Tabitha didn’t visit, Lavi and I departed the house early and ventured across Sepphoris to the southern gate of the city, where I would pause to take in the valley, making a ceremony of it, gazing down on clouds and birds, then up at the sharp blue edges, and the wind would blow wild around me. Then I would descend onto the footpath that led across the hills, determined to find a cave to hide my scrolls and incantation bowl. Time pressed on me. Thus far, Mother had failed to search my aunt’s room. Perhaps it hadn’t yet occurred to her that the two of us were in collusion, but it might, and soon. Each day upon waking, I tore from my room, frantic to find Yaltha and inquire if the bundle was safe.

I asked myself why the prospect of losing thirteen scrolls, two vials of ink, two reed pens, three clean sheets of papyrus, and a bowl set off such desperation in me. Only now do I see the immensity I assigned to these objects. They not only represented those fragile stories I wanted to preserve. They also held the full weight of my craving to express myself, to lift out of my small self, out of the enclosure of my life, and find what lay beyond. I wanted for so much.

The urgency of finding a cave possessed me. Lavi threw himself into the mission, too, though he fretted when I veered from the path. The isolated thickets were populated with badgers, boars, wild goats, hyenas, and jackals. Each time we went out, I wandered farther and farther afield. We came upon men laboring in a limestone quarry, women washing garments in a stream, shepherd boys pretending their crooks were swords, Nazarene girls gathering the late olive harvest. Now and then we passed a pious man praying in a nook of rock or beneath an acacia tree. We found dozens of caves, but none were well suited. They were too accessible, or showed signs of habitation, or had been claimed as a tomb and were sealed with a stone.

We walked the hills to no avail.





xii.


It was rare that Father, Mother, Yaltha, and I shared a meal together other than on the Sabbath, so when Mother insisted we all sit down together, I knew there must be news. Father, however, had taken up the better part of our supper with a tirade about bowls made of gold that were missing from the palace.

“But why should you be concerned with it?” Mother asked.

“They’re the bowls used to serve scribes and subordinates in the library. First, one went missing, then two. Now four. Antipas is angered. He has charged me to find the thief. I cannot see what I’m to do about it—I’m not a palace guard!”

This could hardly be the reason for our family convocation. “We’ve had enough of stolen bowls, Matthias,” Mother said and stood, ebullient, full of leaven. Ah, here it was.

“I have important news, Ana. Your betrothal ceremony will take place at the palace!”

I stared at a sprinkle of pomegranate seeds strewn on the serving platter.

“Did you hear me? Herod Antipas himself will host the betrothal meal. He will act as one of the two witnesses. The tetrarch! The tetrarch, Ana. Can you imagine?”

No. I could not. A betrothal had to be publicly formalized, but did it have to be a spectacle? This bore signs of my mother’s scheming.

I’d never been inside the palace where my father went each day to give the tetrarch advice and record his letters and edicts, but Mother had once attended a banquet there with Father, albeit confined to a separate women’s meal. It had been followed by weeks of obsessive talk about what she’d seen. Roman baths, monkeys chained in the courtyard, fire dancers, platters of roasted ostrich, and most alluring of all, Herod Antipas’s young wife, Phasaelis, a Nabataean princess with a crown of shining black hair that reached the floor. Sitting on her banquet couch, the princess had wrapped locks of her hair about her arms like snakes and entertained the women by undulating her arms. So Mother said.

“When will this take place?” I asked.

“The nineteenth of Marcheshvan.”

“But that is . . . that is only a month away.”

“I know,” she said. “I cannot think how I’ll manage it.” She returned to her place beside Father. “It falls on me, of course, to purchase gifts for the tetrarch and Nathaniel’s family and to accumulate your bridal goods. You will need new tunics, coats, and sandals. I’ll need to purchase hair ornaments, powders, glassware, pottery—I cannot have you arriving at Nathaniel’s house with tattered belongings . . .” On she yattered.